1
Using Old English to Teach the Articles a and the in the Classroom:
An Etymological and Visual Approach
Ken Eckert
Keimyung Adams College, Keimyung University, Daegu
Abstract
Instructors of composition for Korean students often contend with the difficulty of teaching indefinite and definite articles and the tendency of students to omit them in writing. Students need to parse a grammatical concept absent in Korean, and may encounter teachers who intuitively use them but do not explicitly understand them. The situation may be helped by a look at Old English, which also lacked separate articles and which was generating them out of its demonstrative set while evolving into Middle English. An analysis of Old English’s fission of an into modern a / one, and se-seo-þæt into the / that, yields a clearer picture of the language’s distinction between generality and specificity. Pedagogically, we see that an informed ability to teach the etymological logic behind articles may assist students to see the strong visual and physical nature of English articles but also to re-see the concept of specificity as a progression running from zero article through a and that toward the.
Keywords
Old English, articles, etymology, Korean language, academic writing
As a composition professor responsible for both freshmen and supervision of honors thesis projects, my correction marks on student papers are usually insertions and additions of missing words, whether pronouns, prepositions, plural markers to create number agreement, or the dreaded indefinite and definite articles a and the. Korean, as a high-context language (See Harris, 2003, ch. 4), normally omits pronouns and plurals and often omits prepositions where they are obvious within the context of the discourse: “I’m going to church” in Korean, 교회거요, “church-go” would typically omit the –eh 에 preposition (to) in order to avoid a less-euphonic double vowel in conversation. The two-word statement would be nearly meaningless in English without a preposition or pronoun referent.
Articles fare particularly badly with Korean users of English. In conversation they are usually unstressed and easy to miss, and when reading English aloud Koreans may skip over the both to avoid pronouncing the non-native /ð/ and because of the speaker’s “grammatical expectations” (Swan and Smith, 2006, p. 327). Syntactically, the article system “stacks multiple functions onto a single morpheme, which constitutes a considerable burden for the learner who usually looks for a one-to-one correspondence between form and function” (Bataineh, 2005, p. 57). Whereas prepositions at least have correspondence in Korean as postpositional particles (전치사), Korean has no articles and no need for them. At most, there are demonstratives such as this (이) and that (그, 저) used to indicate relative proximity.[1] Even these may often be dropped.
Students are certainly capable of learning the rules and conventions of English articles by rote, but often lack a native-like intuition for their use as a result of language interference. Like an English speaker learning Martian who is told that Martian nouns need to be marked for whether the listener has green or purple antennae, the use of a and the seems to serve no useful purpose. I have encountered students who gave up and simply put the in front of every noun as a modus vivendi: “The student in the classroom gave his the classmate her the pencil and then went to the home to eat the supper.”
Teaching materials for Korean students and the class instruction given by foreign teachers may be well-meaning but often fails to grasp the conceptual hurdle faced by Korean speakers who lack both a clear understanding of the function of articles as well as a justification for their seemingly arbitrary and capricious use. This may be because native speakers themselves often use articles automatically from childhood without a conceptual understanding of their function, and with no knowledge of their history. While much has been written about articles from broad viewpoints of theory and pedagogy, as a specialist in Old and Middle English literature I would like to use my rather rarified discipline to both explain the development of the English article system and to suggest particular strategies for better instruction of its rationale and application for Korean students.
A Brief History of English and its Article System
A perennial source of frustration for the Old or Middle English scholar is the necessity of explaining to every new class, whether native speaking or second-language, that English does not come from Latin. As the following simplified table shows, it is a Germanic language which co-descends with Latin from a lost and theorized language called Indo-European:
FIGURE 1
Indo-European Descendants (Millward, 1988, p. 52-3)
English thus began as a dialect of Low German imported to the island around 500 AD and has a relationship with Latin and the Romance languages closer to that of sibling or cousin rather than parent-child.
Nevertheless, Millward’s chart does not itself indicate the deep extent of word-trading and cross-pollination between languages in the medieval period. England, and English, absorbed Latin missionaries, Norse invaders and settlers, and ultimately Fresh-speaking Vikings who conquered the island in 1066. While British languages such as Welsh remained relatively isolated behind mountain ranges (McCrum et al., 1986, p. 53), the relatively pure Old English language, with its intricate Germanic system of conjugations and endings, broke down under the linguistic confusion into a language relying more on prepositions and word order to create meaning. As its endings simplified or disappeared, English grammatically became less of an inflectional language, like Greek and Latin, and more of an isolating language, like Chinese and Vietnamese (Millward, 1988, p. 42).
Technically, Old English also had no articles, relying on a rather messy set of demonstratives and pronouns where necessary. Modern a descends from Old English an, usually meaning “one” (cognate to German ein and Latin unus), but its usage is erratic: the indefinite article is often omitted in literature—“holtes on ende,” “at the edge of a forest”—or may have a nuance stronger than one: “þæt wæs an cyning,” “that was one peerless king” (Mitchell and Robinson, 1992, p. 107). At times an simply means alone.
Yet generally an served as both a numeral and pronoun, as one does in modern English, before dividing into one and indefinite a / an. In Beowulf (c. 800-1000) the poet tends to omit articles, but in places he anticipates modern usage: it is the custom of the retainers “þæt hie oft wæron / an wig gearwe”—“that they were always ready for a battle” (1248). Later the poet describes a grief-stricken father “sorhleoð gæleð / an æfter anum”—“singing dirges, one after another” (2460-1). But by the time of Havelock the Dane (c. 1285) we have both modern one: “nouth the worth of one nouthe”—“not worth one nut” (1333) and a: “fil me a cuppe of ful god ale”—“fill me a cup of your best ale” (13). A and one are now separate, although some texts intermix them: in The Owl and the Nightingale (c. 1200) the poet sees “an ule and one nyhtegale” (4).[2]
The is decidedly more complicated in origin. Old English had þes (this) and se (that) and variations based on gender or case, including seo (feminine), þæt (neuter), and þa (plural). Thus se could mean modern the (Iohannes se godspellere, “John the Evangelist”) but also that: “se wæs betera ðonne ic”—“that was a better (man) than me” (Beowulf, 469), or even have the sense of relative who / that: “eart þu se Beowulf / se þe wið Brecan wunne”—“are you the Beowulf who (i.e. “that one which”) competed with Breca?” (506). Se, seo, þæt, and þa thus did not exactly correspond to modern the or that but simply had the loose function as a marker of “definitiveness” (Millward, 1988, p. 86).
Old English already had the word þe, but it served different functions—either as relative who / that or a form of thee. In the twelfth century a mysterious act of fission happened by which þe also became an alternative form to se and seo and then took on a separate function as the modern definite article the. The first printing presses to arrive in England lacked English þ and ð, representing /ð/ and /θ/ sounds, and printers at first made do with ye (it was never pronounced /jiː/) and then settled on modern the. Correspondingly, by Middle English the old forms of se and seo had died, leaving only that to evolve into its more limited modern function. The / þe remained indeclinable, so that plural demonstratives these / those developed without interference.
The same process happened in the breakup of Latin into Street Latin and then the Romance languages. Street Latin also had the demonstratives ille (m), illa (f), and illud (n), that, which began to take on greater and more specialized use as articles. As the dialects diverged into their modern descendants they evolved into French le and la, Spanish el and la, and Italian il and la, all meaning the. By the fourth century, late Roman texts employ variations of ille as proto-articles, hugely overused by Classical Latin standards, and by the eighth century the article is “a fully grammatical category” in Romance vernaculars (Alkire and Rosen, 2010, p. 205).
The question still unsatisfactorily resolved is why. Why did all of these languages suddenly need specialized articles at that time? Many language systems have articles—the Arabic definite article al (الـ) gives English al Qaeda but also algebra, alcohol, alchemy, and alcove, reflecting the Arabic influence on science and engineering in the west. But Latin had none, nor does Russian, Turkish, or Hindi. Most of Korea’s neighboring languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Tagalog, have no need of articles. The concept seems largely limited to Indo-European and Semitic languages.
One commonality between the Latinate languages and English is that they both experienced enormous linguistic intermingling and flux in the early medieval period following the decline of the western Roman empire as their inflectional systems became confused and the conservative role of writing temporarily declined. These factors seem to have contributed to the much more vital role of prepositions, articles, and word order in their modern versions. While certain expressions in English have been “grandfathered”—we still say “I’m going home” (Old English ic ga ham)—the more complex grammar of modern English, which has an increased use of complex sentences, subordinate clauses, and passive voice, all tend toward a more inflexible requirement of specificity.
Techniques for Teaching Articles
Bearing in mind this mini-etymology lesson, there are several ways in which articles can be better taught to Korean writers in composition classes, or even conversation classes. A casual hogwan student can normally get by with a sufficiently proximate ability in using articles modeled from the teacher, but a composition student lacks both the immediacy of the teacher’s voice and encounters more difficult and abstract uses of articles. One obvious technique for students with a higher proficiency, or for Korean speakers or fluent non-native speakers of Korean, is to simply explain the origins of the English articles from their genesis as counting and directional words toward more precise functions. Such a historical summary might enable some students to at least conceptualize the vital importance of articles in English for some 900 years.
A second teaching technique is to lay out the three article scenarios of common nouns in order to help students visualize the progression from generality to group membership to individuality:
Zero article Indefinite article Definite article
nothing, s a, an the
Such a presentation also allows students to see that English nouns usually have some addition to their base forms, whether a plural marker or an article: Many schools require school uniforms. My daughter has a uniform. The uniform was very expensive. There are exceptions such as non-count or compound nouns or other situations: “When spring is here the flowers come.” But usually nouns do not occur alone without a, the, or –s, and students may graphically see that the burden of proof is against using the base form of nouns in their writing, even if it is the default usage in Korean.
A third and better means of giving background to and building student intuition for using the article system is to both consciously understand and teach toward comprehension of the indefinite article as a counting concept and the definite article as a concept of spatial distinction reflecting those terms’ etymologies.
Korean students tend to have fewer difficulties with using a in writing, although its middle position in the spectrum between marking category or class (zero article) and recognized individuality (definite article) can be confused. The standard explanation that a denotes a member of a possible group or kind might be clarified by drawing a parallel between a and one, which are logically similar in meaning as determiners even if they have different shades of sense and conventions in usage. It might also be helpful for the purposes of stressing a’s “indefinite” quality to note that any (Old English ænig) and one (an) also derive from a common Proto-Germanic word.
The is harder and its omission in student writing causes the majority of errors, especially where abstractions or complex sentences are involved. Korean has no definite article, though it has demonstratives. Interestingly, Korean uses three, this (이), that here (그) and that over there (저) matching the Romance triplets of proximal, medial, and distal demonstratives (e.g. Spanish este, ese, and aquel), whereas English has only two and needs separate words to emphasize distance (over there, yonder, yon).[3] Korean that (그) even shares with English the the quality of indicating a noun already mentioned or known to the listener. Lacking separate terms to distinguish “that here” (medial) from “that over there” (distal), perhaps Early Middle English evolved the as a solution. The theory is plausible but the paucity of texts makes verification difficult.
An explanation of these similarities or relationships may be interesting to students. In practice, it may be of less help in writing real sentences. One answer may be to look at English demonstratives and articles as fundamentally visual words in function. Old English was a rough and ready language well suited to physical, earthy uses—in Churchill’s wartime vow that “we shall fight them on the beaches” the only non-Germanic word in the sequence is surrender. Old English was less adept at abstractions and usually resorted to loan-words. Þes and þæt, in a generally non-literate culture, would have been used chiefly to manually indicate physical objects—for spatial deixis: in Aelfric’s Genesis, Eve tells the snake that God has warned them “ðæt treow ne hrepodon”—“not to touch that tree.”